Bill Silvert's Scientific Activities
![[Picture of Bill Silvert]](../_images/Silvert.gif)
Dr. William (Bill) Silvert worked for the Canadian Department of
Fisheries and Oceans for over twenty years as a theoretical ecologist. He
retired in 1998 but remained on for several years as an Emeritus Research Scientist in the
Habitat Ecology Section of the Marine Environmental Science Division at the
Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting
Scientist at the Portuguese Institute of Fisheries and Sea Research in Lisbon.
Check here to see a complete list of his recent papers,
or you can look at a shorter listing of the more important papers arranged by
topic.
Bill is the developer of the BSIM
simulation package, which is a set of files and utilities for developing
simulation models in Fortran.
Current Activities
Like many theorists, he is involved in a wide range of activities. These
include:
Environmental Impacts of Fish Farming
He is currently most active on research related to the impacts of fish
farming on marine habitats, and has published numerous papers and reports on the
subject, as given here. Most of this work involves
development of a hierarchical system of nested models. 
The FISH submodel is central to this modelling approach, and is the
basis for the POINT submodel which represents the farm as a point source.
This in turn drives three separate models:
- SETTLE
- This is a model of benthic deposition based on the settling of feed
wastes, faeces, etc.
- FARM
- This models the internal flux of oxygen and other nutrients within the
farm site.
- WQM
- This model is a general Water Quality Model for the inlet based on the
transport of nutrients and water-borne particulates.
Environmental Applications of Fuzzy Logic
A related field of research is the use of fuzzy logic
to analyse benthic data from dive logs. This work, which is being carried out in
conjunction with Dr. Dror Angel from the National Center for Mariculture in
Eilat, Israel, and Dr. Peter Krost from the Insitut für Meereskunde in Kiel,
Germany, is based on several years of field studies under fish
cages in the Gulf of Aqaba at the northern end of the Red Sea. Several
papers arising from this collaboration have
been published or are in preparation.
Long-Term Cyles in Marine Populations
He has written several papers describing different approaches to
understanding long-term cycles in fish and other marine populations:
 | Silvert, William, and William R. Smith. 1981. The response of ecosystems
to external perturbations. Math. Biosci. 55: 279-306. |
| Silvert, W., and R. J. M. Crawford 1988. The Periodic Replacement of One
Fish Stock by Another. Proc. Int. Symp. on Long Term Changes in Marine Fish
Populations, Vigo, Spain, Nov. 1986., 161-180. |
| Silvert, William. 1988. Generic Models of Continental Shelf Ecosystems. In
Ecodynamics: Contributions to Theoretical Ecology, 153-161. W. Wolff,
C.-J. Soeder and F. R. Drepper, eds. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in
Physics, Berlin. |
| Silvert, W. 1993. Size-structured models of
continental shelf food webs. Trophic Models of Aquatic Ecosystems.
ICLARM Cong. Proc. 26: 40-43. V. Christensen and D. Pauly
(eds). |
| William Silvert. 1997. The role of
interactions in long-term population cycles. Environmental Modelling and
Assessment 2: 49-54. |
Phycotoxin Kinetics in Shellfish
He is also actively involved in developing models of phycotoxin kinetics in
shellfish. Recent publications include
| W. Silvert and D. V. Subba Rao. 1992. Dynamic model of the flux of domoic
acid, a neurotoxin, through a Mytilus edulis population. Can. J.
Fish. Aquat. Sci. 49:400-405. |
| W. L. Silvert and A. D. Cembella. 1995. Dynamic Modelling of Phycotoxin
Kinetics in the Blue Mussel, Mytilus edulis, with Implications for
other Marine Invertebrates Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 52:
521-531. |
| D. J. Douglas, E. R. Kenchington, C. J. Bird, R. Pocklington, B. Bradford
and W. Silvert. 1997. Accumulation of domoic acid by the sea scallop Placopectin
magellenicus fed cultured cells of toxic Pseudo-nitzschia
multiseries. Can. J. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 54: 907-913. |
| William Silvert, Monica Bricelj and Allan Cembella. 1998. Dynamic
modelling of PSP toxicity in the surfclam (Spisula solidissima):
multicompartmental kinetics and biotransformation. International
Conference on Harmful Algae, Vigo, Spain, June 1997. In Harmful
Microalgae. B. Reguera, J. Blanco, M. L. Fernandez, and T. Wyatt, Eds.
Xunta de Galicia and Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO,
p. 437-440. |
| Silvert, William, and Allan Cembella. 1999. Inverse Modelling of Water
Column Toxicity by Back-Calculation from Shellfish Toxicity. Proc. 6th
Canadian Workshop on Harmful Marine Algae, J. L. Martin and K. Haya (Eds.).
Can. Tech. Rep. Fish. Aquat. Sci. 2261: 44-51 |
Ecosystem Complexity
One of his pet projects is working on the significance of complexity
in ecology, summarised in William Silvert. 1996. Complexity. J. Biol. Systems 4:
585-591.
Other Topics
He has done extensive research on fisheries
problems, including issues of management and optimisation for multi-species
fisheries, and he has written many papers on general problems of ecological
theory and modelling, especially in the4 context of marine ecosystems. One
of his particular areas of interest, although one in which he has not had many
recent opportunities to work, is in the theory of particle
size distributions in aquatic ecosystems.
 For further topics consult his bibliography.
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